Today, most stores selling goods or services have both a computer transaction system to record sales activity when employees are present and a store security system to watch the store when employees are not present. Often the computer system is a Point Of Sale (POS) hardware and software system provided to the owner of a franchise such as a McDonalds, Wendy's, Great Clips, Pro Cuts, Texaco, Exxon, Pep Boys, Auto Zone, Jiffy Lube, etc., by the franchiser and is designed to provide the owner with customer and sales information as input by the employees into the POS computer system.
Store security systems are provided by a number of vendors such as ADT and Smith Alarm and are primarily designed to store activity and after hours and thwart attempted burglaries. Since the advent of the video camera, a video camera connected to other sensors such as motion, or door and window, or cash drawer sensors are the primary elements of store security systems.
More recently, video surveillance systems have been employed to help owners catch employee theft. It is well known in all the various industry sectors (especially service industries) that employee theft is the greatest operating loss facing owners due to the discrepancy between the actual customer store transaction versus the data entered (or not entered) into the store POS computer system. The video surveillance systems in recent years have provided more information to help curb this loss, but it still requires a lot of time and effort by the owner to try and correlate information from a store surveillance system depicting customer store activity, for example, with the store POS computer system operated by the employee. Such correlation must show that an employee serviced a customer without inputting the transaction into the store computer system and kept the revenue or input an incorrect amount in order to manipulate the reported amount.
Large corporations such as Dillard's, Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Wal-Mart, Target and many others, including casinos, have developed extensive security monitoring systems to help catch employee theft, but these are primarily systems requiring management personnel and strict employee money handling policies implemented to quickly catch unsophisticated employee theft through a series of daily checks and balances but not through any fully automated system.
Store and business computer systems are well known in the art and recently companies such as BEA, Peoplesoft, IBM, Siebel, Microsoft, Oracle and many others have developed specialized business programs accessible from the Web but not store computer systems where the owner can operate the store computer program from remote locations and none of them have developed store transaction system. Programs such as PC anywhere or services such as www.gotomypc.com can be used to operate a computer remotely but a “disconnected” system that behind the scenes goes and operates the store computer to input changes made by store owners are not available.
The Franchise companies are taking the lead in developing Internet sites where a store owner can view their operational data such as at www.salondata.com but do not offer the ability to operate the store computer system in a connected or disconnected manner from a website.
A typical state of the art web accessible store or home security surveillance system can be seen at www.adt.com. However, store surveillance systems fall way short of the complicated customer activity determination required by a store transaction system and, a store transaction system as described herein has not been developed in the industry until now. Furthermore the integration of a store point of sale computer system with a store transaction system such as described in this invention is not even being discussed in the current business trade journals as a solution to the employee revenue theft problem and the system described herein offers a way for technology to greatly lower employee theft in a cost effective manner.